In a hidden art gallery near the top of Canada's tallest building, this artwork eerily defies gravity

High atop Toronto's First Canadian Place — operational headquarters for the Bank of Montreal and the tallest building in the country — a tiny exhibition space, viewable only by appointment, has quietly hosted ambitious art projects by some of the nation's best artists for the past 15 years. 

For the lucky few who took the 60-some-odd-floor elevator ride to visit Jon Sasaki's  A Space of Endless Potential in the BMO Project Room during its brief exhibition run in August, what they encountered was from another world. 

From the doorway, the room looked utterly common: a skinny office with vinyl flooring and bright white tube lights — the kind of workspace you might visit to fetch printouts or make photocopies. But in that most ordinary place, something extraordinary was going on. Moving in eerie slow motion, as if on another planet, a small orange ball bounced around the room, never flagging or losing energy. It just ricocheted around the space at 1/30th the speed, stuck magically in perpetual motion. Watching the object gradually trace its path around the room, you could feel your breathing slow as your body searched to find the rhythm of this strange, new environment.

Watch a video of the artwork below.  

"The conceit is just so incredibly simple," the Toronto-based artist told CBC Arts in an interview. "It's a ball bouncing in slow motion, in perpetuity. It's intended to create this lunar, otherworldly space in the Project Room." It's a place, he explains, where the familiar laws of gravity and motion seem to have been altered or suspended.  

Sasaki collaborated with artist and engineer Gordon Hicks to bring the idea to life. "It's one thing to sort of doodle on a napkin as the artist, but then something else entirely — and I give so much credit to Gord — to translate that sketch of an idea into the real world." 

The artwork functions like "a big 3D printer," Sasaki says. A number of servos control a gantry that slides through the room at ceiling height and drops a spool of nearly invisible filament with a ball attached to the other end. The robotic puppeteer creates "bounce profiles" that model the way a bouncing ball would actually behave in the space were it to experience no energy loss. Its path is randomized, Sasaki explains, and will never repeat.  

The artist and his collaborator made no attempt to hide the mechanics of the installation. "I was always interested in the illusion and that conflicting awareness of how the illusion was being done," Sasaki says. The artwork shows visitors exactly how its trick is performed. And still, you find yourself falling for it.

Making the illusion convincing, however, was an engineering feat that took years to accomplish. "The more research we did," Sasaki says, "we realized that this couldn't be [made from] off-the-shelf parts. Every single component needed to be designed from scratch."

BMO Senior Curator Brad van der Zanden explains that the work was installed in early 2023 with the intention to exhibit that year, but the project's technical complexity was such that it wasn't up and running till this past summer. They were able to extend its tenure in the Project Room through August for viewing. 

The first time Sasaki saw the work in action, it was "so incredibly uplifting," he says. "There was something about being in that space that felt like it was charging up my body." He sees the work — with its proposition of infinite potential — as a metaphoric "wish for ourselves."

"I'm sure a lot of people … can relate to feeling rundown and needing to find sources of renewed energy," he says. The bouncing ball represents the impossible dream of being able to go on forever. 

The artwork is also something of a love letter to the space itself, where more than a dozen Canadian artists have been given the opportunity to explore possibility in this semi-secret sandbox perched high in the sky. He mentions Roula Partheniou's meticulously sculpted carnival game installation and Michel de Broin's sandcastle-building machine as memorable editions. The BMO Project Room itself has been a space of endless potential.

And though the door may have closed on Sasaki's turn in the room, it is easy to imagine that small orange ball still in there — bouncing around forever.